BOUNDARY BAY — Martin Gregus Jr. can spend two hours getting the photo he wants, slithering on his belly amongst the foreshore grasses and mud until he’s within metres of a snowy owl.

Sometimes people admonish him for not staying on the public dike in South Delta, but the 17-year-old award-winning photographer says they don’t appreciate his understanding of the owls’ behaviour and his ability to approach closely without disturbing them.

“You must know your subject,” the Grade 12 student at Carson Graham secondary school in North Vancouver said Friday. “You don’t speak bird but you must anticipate what they are saying....

“They get completely used to me, as though I am part of nature.”

He also accurately observes that the province allows hunters onto the foreshore to kill ducks and geese with shotguns. “They go out there and get as close to snowy owls as photographers.”

Gregus accompanied The Vancouver Sun on a walk along the gravel dike where some 20 snowy owls were visible on the driftwood in the distance.

Suddenly we noticed one perched just 10 metres behind us on the Houweling Nurseries Ltd. greenhouse property off 64th Street. “Oh, my goodness,” said Gregus, who immigrated to Canada from Slovakia nine years ago.

He pointed his 80-400-millimetre zoom lens at the owl and snapped away without the bird showing the least concern.

Then several other people joined us, including two photographers with big bulky tripods.

Signs on the linear dike path, part of Boundary Bay Regional Park, ask visitors to stay on the path, keep dogs leashed, use a zoom lens, and not to get too close. The foreshore and bay actually fall within a provincial wildlife management area.

Gregus said some photographers deliberately approach too closely to get an image of the owl in flight. “It doesn’t necessarily pay off. If they push the bird, it will never fly towards them.”

He has even taken advantage of other photographers’ clumsiness to get his own great shot by positioning himself so that the owl flew towards him.

“Sit and wait and anticipate what the owl will do. I got him with his wings stretched against the nice light.”

Gregus took up photography around the time he moved to Canada, fascinated at the start by cruise ships and later moving to people, landscapes and nature.

In 2009, he received an honourable mention in a contest sponsored by the Museum of Flight in Seattle for a photo of a skydiver trailing multi-coloured smoke at the Abbotsford Air Show.

In 2010, he won the 11-to-14-year-old category at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards at the Natural History Museum in London, England, for a photo of a sandhill crane at the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary on Westham Island near Ladner.

Martin Sr. has worked as a professional commercial photographer and comes along to help direct his son to the owls by walkie-talkie or cellphone and to ensure he’s safe.

“Sometimes I wonder, ‘where is he?’” father allows. “You lose him. I know there are many holes. I won’t let him go there alone. It can be dangerous. It’s not that easy.”

You’d think that with all that slinking around the owls would view his son as a predator.

But Martin Jr. insists he does it so gradually and over such a long time that the owls reckon no predator would ever put in such effort and finally just accept him.

“After the birds know you won’t hurt them, they allow you to get closer.”

Sometimes they serve practical purposes.

He once lost his cellphone on the foreshore and used his dad’s cellphone to call his number.

They identified the location by a snowy owl curiously looking down.

“My phone was right underneath it,” the teen says.

Gregus is working with his dad on designing a floating “hide” for photographers and hopes to put out some photography books and eventually work full-time in the business. He already has a website, www.matkopictures.com, on which he sells prints, postcards, and notecards.

“I’ve kind of skipped the age where I hang out with my friends,” he concedes. “If I’m not here I’m at home going through pictures.

“But I am doing something I love.”

This is the second consecutive year that the snowy owls have arrived in significant numbers at Boundary Bay.

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